 Call of Order, this meeting of the Planning Commission for January 13th, of course we have to approve the agenda. I'd like to make a quick addition to the agenda. I don't know if this is worth putting on the agenda, but I would like to add a really quick item after we approve the minutes and that is I just had a question to Mike to ask whether or not the city has sort of has any has talked about the proposed changes to Act 250 that's sort of working its way to the legislature and if so what okay sure we'll handle it that way so do we have do we have an approval with Aaron's amendment I will move to approve with thank you Marcel a second second okay all in agreement say aye any opposed okay so we've approved the agenda with Aaron's amendment for a new item six with that will move on comments from the chair is the next item and the only comment I have right now is to remind everyone or first I should ask just to verify all the Google says it was delivered to everyone get the email about the legislative reception okay so that's January 30th five to seven social event completely optional free food though and you can bring someone else so it is a way to like get out in the winter discovered so I think they want us to RSVP very soon if you if you do think you'll go I would encourage you to go ahead and RSVP right away and I believe Jamie who's collecting notices moving on that's what her email said today yes so the the Jamie's replacement is Jasmine lamb and so her email would be Jay lamb at Montpelier lamb like the LAMB yes Montpelier dash but you can probably email back to Jamie and it'll she's continuing to keep an eye on her emails to forward things right so if somebody doesn't have that and still wants to email back to Jamie you can do that great okay that's all I have so with that we can move on to listen to anyone else have anything else Erin missed his chance so there's nothing else okay so we'll move on with general business so we can take comments from the public before getting into the rest of the agenda we have one member of the public here is there anything you'd like to address for the planning Commission just here to watch super it's completely up to you so my name is Whitney Shields I live in Montpelier I've been resident for a year I work at the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems at Vermont Law School and so food policy is something that I am is my career and I wanted to be something that bleeds into my personal life as well the Planning Commission is a really good place to kind of just hear about what's going on and if food access is a topic that's discussed and so I'm hoping to go to a bunch of meetings and the next year just to observe and if I can give my expertise in any way let me know okay that's that's great so just to give you some more information about what we've been up to recently as we're working on redoing the city plan and I think there probably is space somewhere on the city plan for to address to dress food and those issues Mike could probably speak to what chapter would be misappropriate right now we're talking about housing that's what we're talking about tonight right yeah okay there's also a couple of ELS grads up here can I just ask I'm just curious so you say food access are you thinking both about like food security and like community gardening in Montpelier or farming or yeah yeah I would be interested to know yeah I mean I think that's a community conversation when I talk about food access it's really that all folks living in Montpelier have access to affordable healthy nutritious food at all time and I think that food security in general is a concern not only in Vermont but in the United States and so that's really what I'm talking about when I need food access what that means in practice I guess it really depends I think it's different for each city and each locality and so that's something I'd love to investigate with all of you thanks much thank you okay so with that it's time to prove the minutes from December 9th meeting we did not meet two weeks ago it's been a month we're gonna take a look at some meetings it's a declarative although I actually am not aware of that that's responsibility I thought for which piece the about working on the other public art in the art chapter I was not planning personally to reach out to Montpelier alive no I will be right okay so I don't think we need to fix that but just to clarify and also the Commission did we talk about that last not that it used to be in here but the public art the public art commission would be yeah there'll be another one that will be I'll be reaching out to and I'll talk a little bit more about that one the city plan part approval of the minutes okay do we have a second a second okay more similar yeah good point good point so those in favor of approving minutes opposed okay minutes from December 9th are approved which brings us to the new item which is Aaron has a question about act 250 yeah this is more of a question like which is so on legislative agenda this year talking about modernizing act 250 I know very a little about the particulars of what moving to the legislature although I do under my understanding is a sort of broad brushstroke sort of understanding is is that one of the things on the table is is exempting visiting downtown districts from act 250 so I was just wondering has your office sort of been keeping track of this do you guys have an opinion on it I'm just because I think that something like that would certainly affect how the planning commission proceeds especially since we're looking at you know revamping the town plan and and since we've just set those reset those boundaries I just thought it might be worth sort of see there is no they're partially exempt it it increases the threshold for certain projects like housing but not everything ends up being exempt the proposed hotel and parking garage or in act 250 simply because they count hotel rooms as dwelling units and therefore it exceeded the 50 you can get up to 50 units without act 250 in a designated downtown but the hotel had too many rooms so it put us in act 250 like a subdivision yeah so kind of a strange quirky rule but that's so this would just go through and say if it's in the designated downtown doesn't matter what you're doing it'll be exempt so there's so to answer the question there's been a lot of proposals I worked with Vermont planers Association on they had some members on the task force of the steering committee that was working on it and so then we had a committee that would kind of give input to them to take to the committees to work on it there's a lot of work last year and then apparently there was work that happened over the summer that people didn't know about between the administration and some some key groups and they kind of hammered out a compromise so we're just learning about where that hammered out compromise stands and how that fit in with some of our recommendations it's not that far off of what we were talking about some of these recommendations like exempting designated downtown's were some of the things that we had been talking about a lot of it is going to come down to really key obviously just the details but certainly the Vermont planners had stressed and we were by no means unanimous group there are some people that really wanted to expand act 250 into more areas and then there are other people who wanted to just narrow it down to the areas where it was most important but generally there was support to exempt the designated downtown there was support to allow for what I would call removal of jurisdiction from act 250 so some places go in and you've got a small subdivision that goes in with eight new houses once those houses are in act 250 they they remain in act 250 and have to go through amended act 250s for for different projects that that come up because once you're in act 250 everything stays in and so the thought was it doesn't make sense that somebody who lives in a house in a subdivision that was made in 1985 should be that much different than a subdivision from you know 1968 it's you should be able to say you've got to go through act 250 once we make the subdivision once it's there once it's sold act 250 would go through and say yep you met all of our requirements will release you back to being regulated by the towns and not have to go back to act 250 so there are a couple of proposals like that in certain cases things wouldn't certain things you know cases things would you know would be able to stay in so it's there were some proposals like that we've we've been just tracking to kind of see where things go I think this new proposal is going to be interesting just to see there isn't anything that jumped out at me so far that was necessarily something I was strongly opposed to as it certainly as it applies to our job here at the city there's been some discussion of lowering the jurisdiction from 2500 feet to 1500 feet that wouldn't affect us there's some exempting of the river corridor from traditional from from the neighborhoods there's a neighborhood designation so there's a discussion of removing that so I mean think most of these are relatively small changes that won't affect us but I'll continue to be keeping an eye on it because it does make a difference for us the other one that we're keeping an eye on is there's a housing bill that's going through that could provide more funding for housing projects which we think is a pretty it's a pretty interesting bill has a number of different ideas in that there's another bill to allow municipalities to regulate Airbnb it hasn't been an issue here but it's obviously something that could probably change pretty quickly if there was a sudden growth of Airbnb's and in the city so that I think that was most of the oh and the last one that I've been kind of keeping an eye on is there's a proposal for what are called project specific tiffs as opposed to having to tiff districts and it's something I'd been talking with the state on that I thought would be really helpful because a lot of times we get projects that come up that it's just a single project and should why should you have to go through a huge process if in our case we had Caledonia spirit that was coming in as a proposal we couldn't do any tiff because it wasn't in a tiff district and it would take us a long time to do it but what they had were utility needs they needed to have the water line moved they needed to have the water line upgraded and we need to extend the sewer line to make that project happen and it would have made a lot of sense just to go through and say hey we've got a project we have you know three hundred thousand dollars in utility needs this is a project that's going to generate X in taxes we could do a really quick tiff for this one project if you know and then go to the board maybe go to the state board to get approval for that project as opposed to having to do a whole district it's something now that we have a tiff district we probably wouldn't need that but it's an idea that I would be I think would be helpful for a lot of other communities so those are the ones that I've been kind of keeping an eye on but we have a representative from the planning association who keeps track of everything at the state gives us weekly updates on on the bills as they're moving in the general opinion so you know the auditors looking at tiffs right now I know the auditors looking at this yes yes the auditor has made his opinions on tiffs well-known thanks okay all right thanks for the update with that we can back into the city plan and reviewing and discussion of the housing neighborhoods chapter you know where we left off well we had actually sent this back and got right comments and so I want to take a quick second to go over the the little chart of the the 13 chapters and kind of where they are right now just so we get a sense of where what I've been working on and where we're going so the arts and culture chapter I haven't started that chapter we talked about it with the historic resources and decided to pull out culture create a new chapter with arts and then to work with Montpelier alive and the public art commission to go through and start to develop that chapter I haven't put together the notes on that one yet I usually what I do is I put together some notes and then I made with them to kind of give them some ideas of how to think about it and then I work with them to come up with some implementation plans so that's one that's that's waiting along with community services so I haven't started that one either but I'm hoping to start both of those in February so economic development is one that I've had the notes ready to go and things were working and I had been waiting for the new economic development director to show up Lisa Maxwell unfortunately Lisa had to leave her position shortly after taking it so they're going to not have a director for a while so Dan from Montpelier alive has agreed to work with me and I'm going to try to connect with their the MDC board of directors to kind of go through the proposal the the implementation strategy almost exactly like this is almost it's basically complete it just needs to have the review of a committee to kind of go through it I had worked on most of it with the prior economic developer and so I'm I mean I'm feeling that that this could get wrapped up relatively quick as soon as I get some opportunity to start working with Dan and them on that the energy plan I'm still meeting with the subcommittee we've finalized everything and I'll be meeting with the subcommittee the last week of January and then I'll be on the MEAC agenda for February to get that approved so that one should that one's really close to being done governance will be starting in February I'll be working with Cameron the new assistant city manager on that one historic the HPC's meeting tomorrow night so that should be back to you guys for February that'll be done housing we made our comments I made some recommendations for the priorities to cost and who and I sent that back to the housing committee who made some changes and approve that so this should be the last meeting we need for housing implementation is basically done land use we have to do here natural resources I've met once with them and I was supposed to meet with them in December but it was one of the nights I was having the snow squalls and so I had to bail on that meeting conservation commission I'll have to yeah once I get that the get it through it natural resources the parks commission may be there and they may be community services it's kind of I've got to kind of see where they're gonna land and they may be in a little bit of both public safety and CJC I'm gonna be starting in February transportation I've been working with them I've met with them a number of times they are a meeting with a subcommittee this week on Thursday to draft the the goals and strategies and then because they've already approved their aspirations I just need their goals and strategies and then we will meet in February where they are going to try to approve in February so you guys could have that for you the end of February or March so they're going pretty well in utilities and facilities doesn't have a committee I have that chapter done I just have to get some time to meet with the city engineer talk with Kurt and start to set up some meetings where we can review the draft for utilities and facilities so a number of these chapters are going I think there are five four or five of them arts community services governance land use and public safety so we've got five of them that are really need to get started and I'm looking to get those started in February so these other ones hopefully we'll start rolling in and my hope is to have all these done by by June so we can start moving forward on the chapters themselves and I'd mentioned briefly at this before them the meeting started John and I met with folks for the ArcGIS hub which I think is going to work out well it's it's online with John had done some stuff early on which you saw online and this is just a portal that'll give us an opportunity to kind of develop the plan chapters in this it might give us a foundation for our web based plan so if we get that that'll give us a good opportunity to kind of build build these chapters out as we once the implementation plan is ready that's the implementation plan isn't really going to be on online it's really going to be the chapters that are going to be online with the links to the implementation strategies that was kind of so that was it was good but we have a couple of items we I still need to work out so we can actually get online with that now check the deck so that's a ten minute five minute just summary of where we're at coming into the new year and the council and city manager are now kind of looking and putting a little more pressure to keep this to get this moving to start getting stuff moving towards completion so I recognize we need we needed to keep moving this forward but I think we've worked out a lot of the process and the bugs and the framework pretty well so makes a little bit easier when we know where we're going now it's just a matter of filling in the holes on the housing the specific things that really changed in the housing the easiest thing to point to is at the bottom of the first page you'll notice there's a parentheses which says priority medium cost low who CD specialist so for everything that was not a continued so if we're continuing something we didn't prioritize it it's just something we're working on and we're gonna keep working on but for everything that was new in this case develop a utility and infrastructure incentive program we wanted to have them identify what's the priority low medium high and we you know there's it's all kind of arbitrary there's there's no real hardened fast piece of what's a low and what's a medium and what's a high but we just wanted them to go and really get an idea of you everything can't be a high priority what's the cost low we kind of looked at anything that's like less than a thousand dollars medium would be anything up to like a hundred thousand dollars and your high costs are things that are more than a hundred thousand dollars so a lot of planning and developing programs and stuff are probably low to medium cost and then who's going to do it in this case it's to see community development specialist so we went through and addressed that for any of the ones that are adopt the new amend the unified development regulations which is the zoning and you'll notice that there are priorities costs and who's going to be doing it for each one of those going through why would map a streamlined or how I guess I should it's for a streamlining the permitting process yeah well it it would make the process for map really only comes into effect for projects that go to the DRB and the idea is if we've you are using Mapa then we can help to eliminate some of the frivolous appeals on things because it's gonna are we talking about on the record review on the record review yeah should we say that I don't know if there's an atomist or not I think they were but that's what we're talking about I mean I can certainly go through and put a hyphen on the record review and yeah now that we're not doing the next layer we kind of have to add a little bit more information into these so okay so this is so the the priority listings is it in response to our request right I think there was a request for all three pieces the priority the cost and who would be doing it but I think the initial question was we've got a lot of things to do shouldn't they prioritize which ones are the most important right so yes just the planning commission have any thoughts on now that we have that information do people feel like it could be left the way it is in the city plan this is something that we plan to bring to every chapter yes now that now that we have it in this one I've been building it into the to the other ones that's the thing the energy plan that's why that one is waiting is actually so we can discuss the prioritization is there anything more we want to do with that information do we have this available in Google Drive or something I know I put in a couple of things I don't know if I put it in word version if people wanted to like organize it you mean based on priority yeah yeah I went on the Google Drive and I added a I added a folder for each one of our chapters and I know I was putting a few things on I don't know if I put this one on but I could put on the word version the old ones up and if we like break out the priority and cost in the table you could basically just look at it flotted out we could see the quadrants of like what what's a low cost and impact for a priority that would help you a lot yeah and if you missed the last I don't remember first last meeting we talked about it or one of the earlier ones we've talked about we're kind of sticking with this for our development standpoint but we think when we get there we're gonna reshuffle them so that way we kind of have goals you know aspirations goals and then the strategies so that way all these repeats you know continue to participate in designated downtown program it shows up over and over and over again we really only have to say it once but we can come up with another way of showing it yeah that particular one is under a number of goals was anything else in here based on responses to I don't think so I think you had more comments to the historic preservation group who they're actually I think they're second this is their second meeting talking about your comments on those so that'll be tomorrow night but I don't think we had as many comments on this one I recall that some members some commissioners have ideas of other things to include is tonight a good night to talk about any further inclusions or anything or is it something that we're better off waiting until later in the process to do to phrase this a little bit differently and also more broadly maybe I could just say does anyone have any anything to talk about for the housing chapter right now anything missing anything that's here that to work on the vacancies is always a little bit of a weird one it's hard to we want a benchmark that signifies like a healthy market but it's one that I think has a relatively high margin of error and then can also be a bad if our vacancy rate were to just drop to 5% that would probably be a negative indicator so I don't know if it's like I understand what it's saying we want to help the vacancy rain yeah yeah our housing costs are going up because our vacancy rates are so low so our goal is to keep adding housing units so we can make the vacancy rate go up somewhat but our goal is the same like to have vacant homes so like let's make that our goal like let's have homes for people because that we can measure yeah but I mean I feel like I want to have something and maybe it's not vacancy that's related to cost cuz units doesn't mean affordable so how do we you know right the vacancy indicates that there's some pressures on keeping things portable so how do we is there another benchmark we could use for that yeah if we want to get it affordability but let's try to measure that just I'm wary of using vacancy because it can be a lot of different things and it's it's a complicated one and one that we don't have very good metrics have we and that we thought this before and I'm apologize for not moving very well but we talked about down street and their involvement yeah they're on the housing task force they are okay so they've had opportunity for input for yeah I mean it is it is true these are they're they're relatively difficult benchmarks to you know what you want to you know what you want to get at but what you usually want to benchmark is are the things that make the change that you want to see so if you want to reduce storefront vacancies you might not benchmark storefront vacancies to be your target you might go through and say we want a certain number of jobs created and if we had more jobs in this area then we would have more people in that area more people would provide more opportunity for businesses to be successful in that area and that was that's the theory when I was in Berry City we were looking at because they had 40 35 40% vacancies in the downtown in the retail so the goal was we got to get more jobs more jobs mean more feet or feet it's gonna give us better chances that people will show up and be able to have storefront as opposed to saying our benchmark is the storefront our benchmark was the jobs and the side effect of more jobs was gonna be making our goal happen so it's kind of ultimately yes we are measuring the storefront but to get there we're measuring the jobs and I think that's a little bit of what this is looking at and it is it is a difficult measure because we don't it's something that fluctuates relatively quickly it can fluctuate throughout the year and it's tough to kind of get get a hold of where it's at but especially with Airbnb it's when you get a vacancy somebody may decide it's easier to fill it with an Airbnb and now it's not vacant yeah it does but we know we want more housing we know we want more housing affordable we wanted all types right yes ownership we want rental feels like we should be able that's like a good clean target for people to understand I ask ourselves how we're doing so that was in here right there is 150 housing units is one of the targets one reason why I'm not come that comfortable with that is that I feel like it could end up being under it like it could be it could end up being too low where let's say savings actually gets developed and and a really great way like and then all of a sudden this goal is met but we kind of still do want to do housing elsewhere within the city yeah do we want to have a like a minimum of this many one of the things that you know you see in communities as people say well you we have this target now we've hit it which means we need we don't want any more housing in our community right yeah that's what I'm getting at yeah we just want to keep developing housing until we start to see the affordability come back and I think there's a little bit of 150 housing units in five years and necessary 240 units by 2028 which is the eight-year plan window it's actually relatively that those are actually somewhat aggressive numbers I mean if we can get savings pastor great we we get to hit a home run on getting all those boxes checked all at once because we could 200 housing units in that lower pastor pretty easy without that you know this year we brought 50 units online you know with all the work that was with French Block and the Taylor Street project but there's only so many yeah there's only so many of us you don't do that most years and so and that was only 50 units and you know we're trying to do 30 units a year so it's we don't get a lot of big projects we're working on a lot of small projects so it does them would I don't know who the right person would be if each be or for someone to say like yeah in my period we think like this many affordable have you know housing product units could be developed oh just like looking at the land use or the yeah I don't know looking at like the pipeline like realistically what because we can't we can't expect like that private sector just to generate affordable housing for us right we can't even generate like for profit so so like seems like asking the people who create affordable housing how many affordable housing units should we shoot for yeah well yeah Jen Holler who was at BHCB is on this committee so she's yeah she's on I feel confident in her so I assume they had some yeah reasoning behind this these numbers yeah they're so their target in the the housing fund so they've got the housing trust fund their goal is every five years to be able to build that up to two hundred thousand dollars in the trust fund and reserve so they could spend it on one large project so think about a 30 unit project every five years from from from them because they've got down street and a lot of these housing for month they've got responsibilities over a large geographic area and they hadn't spent a lot of time in Montpelier in the past and then kind of French block and this one came up and so they they spent a lot of time here I think they have plans they would like to do the church street or that the Christ Church housing project as their next project which I think would be another great 30 to 40 units and that'll be in five years but I think that's gonna be more realistically the pace over the next couple of years is that you know we can count on them for you know one year's worth of housing units and then we're gonna have to be creative about how we do the next ones you know how do we how do we get affordable housing and certainly the pilot program we're doing right now for accessory dwelling units shows a lot of promise we're working out a lot of the kinks and problems that you know that have shown up in trying to develop these you know we made certain assumptions and they're learning that not all those assumptions were accurate but there's still a lot of interest from people in Montpelier who would like to do these accessory dwelling units you know they're just costing a little bit more to build and we have a few hurdles to kind of get through from financing but if we can get through those there's another opportunity to get you know maybe about how many have been interested in adding it we had over 50 people who were interested in doing them not all of them qualified not all of them you know because you need private capital the idea of this program is not that it's fully funded but that we're gonna come in and provide ten thousand dollars in loans and ten thousand dollars in grants or twenty thousand dollars in grants to a project and you have to put in the rest of the capital we thought these would be about forty thousand dollar projects are turning it to be sixty thousand other projects and so you know people need to have equity in their homes because you it's very difficult to get construction loans to be able to do this so you really have to do a home equity loan to be able to do it so you know that kind of narrows down who qualifies so we're working through those we're learning but there certainly was a great deal of interest from people who want to do these and I think they've approved the seven or eight that they're gonna do but we're now starting to look at all right what's phase two look like what what happens when the state housing authority goes away and this is just a city project a city program how can how much money do we need how do we keep this program going their stipulation on use for those units they participate like whether they decide to rent it out to someone full-time or do Airbnb yeah there are restrictions on the Airbnb for a couple of for a number of years I can't remember whether it's up to five years I can't remember and then there's there can be an income requirement too because we're using community development block grant funding those restrictions go away when we've got a new program that's not using that source of funding then then we've got more flexibility but then we don't have that funding but it was good that there was so much interest in being able to do it so people are not opposed to adding units either over their garages or subdividing space out of a larger home and would any of these like these programs some of them are a little bit vague but is there we talked about the idea of like the small developers bootcamp or enabling people to do some of these things taking advantage of the skill some skill sets they may have it may not be that they're gonna do their plumbing but like you know the idea being if we're not gonna build things ourselves here no one is coming we don't have like a big developer so like they just start looking at economic being like hey this isn't that hard like let's do it and some of these you know maybe after that like the sort of outreach programs but it's unclear me what the content is I think it could be fine to add something new to be specific about that just like maybe maybe this will we can do some we added yeah I mean we added one that talked about new housing marketing and outreach to market incentives to strategies and strategies to builders I don't know if we've got one that and I don't know if we would have this skills to do the education of them they usually know more about this than we do be interested to see if our partners have bringing in like the development alliance which I thought we're applying for MPG for what's that group called they think their their head person's name is John Anderson so if they come we need to like be like not that John Anderson that Johnny Anderson yeah I'm not aware of their their stuff but that's that certainly we can see what for any of these goals are we are you thinking as we develop these out that some of the goals would have some like kind of software language like something like facilitate or assist with the community to like what I'm talking about is like the city being in a supportive role but that's not necessarily having the lead but that's still being a goal in the plan yeah if we can come in and make it specific as to what our role is you know if it's if it's organize a meeting or if it's says is that what you're imagining John for this you imagine that the city is looking to supportive role but not necessarily the primary organizer of the thing yeah it may be like you know a three-part like multi-day workshop that they facilitate apply for get some of the funding to bring in the trainers or okay so you are thinking the city though it's taking that the taking point right I wasn't thinking we'd get like Mike's in a go show people how to like so hammer in that would be poor be a bad idea unless you yeah I don't know I you may be you know an accomplished homebuilder Mike yeah right person much my wife is pretty talented but did you put a workshop on teaching people how to hey though I could definitely teach people how to hey how to fix a broken notter in your payballer step one learn what a notter they do you like that they give you they help you through all your performance and they show you the pitfalls of like oh when you add this then you have to meet this requirement which will add this cost and like seems very pragmatic was it working with the developing the developers or is it working the contractors or is it an education for the homeowners it's for whoever might be interested in being a developer like a four-unit and giving them a bit more of that confidence and support and they might have you know they might know something about design they might know something about process sounds a little bit like what we're doing right now for the accessory dwelling units right because that's part of the way that program works as we educate the homeowners and try to get them over the barriers and the barriers in the past have been people you know I've got equity I've got a house but I don't know the first thing about how to build an accessory dwelling unit I don't know how to get permits I don't know how to hire a contractor I don't want to hire somebody and then find out it's $80,000 when I thought I was only gonna be 25 and so that's a little bit of what the accessory dwelling unit program would be but I guess this is kind of along that same line it's just broadening it out to people who may have an interest in other yeah exactly I have a question about how the chapters speak to each other I guess so as an example one of the goals interesting number of neighborhoods that have a park recreation area we can have miles edge I know that that's also a goal and it's coming from the parks commission so are are the goals gonna other goals that will make an appearance in multiple chapters that will have different strategies under them from different chapters that are somehow connected is that something that you're doing yes we should also be yeah the challenge the challenge we have right now is that obviously these are the first one so we kind of have to make an assumption about what's gonna appear in a later in a later chapter but yes the idea is that these would be nested in in order to make our housing goals work we need to have our parks commission and our parks goals accomplish theirs and if we want to have well-connected neighborhoods to the downtown then the transportation committee is gonna have to give us complete streets and sidewalks and bike lanes but as this gets back to the housing committee and you know the housing task force they're not really gonna be working on on that we recognize those as their goals but we accomplish our goals by supporting the transportation committee and so we're gonna just need to keep an eye that these as we work our way through if the parks goal is slightly different if they don't use the word green print or whatever in their plan if it becomes a parks plan or something else then we'll just have to come back and make sure that we match things up in the end so that also seems like we should just say like here's where we're supposed to these qualifiers and figuring out where that's supposed to be yeah I guess what one of them yeah which is leading which one are we putting the houses near the parks or are we adding parks near the housing in this case I know that the Parks Commission has interest in adding more parks because we have one great wonderful park and we've got North Branch which is a wonderful park but they're all kind of in the same area so there are a lot of neighborhoods that exist today that don't have park lands so you know can we get a park in savings pasture can we get a park on the other side of the river near Berlin Street because that's a that's a large area with a lot of people and there are no parks on that side so in this case it's putting parks near housing but we can look at it the other way around putting houses near parks too well if it's something that I this goal ultimately might not when we get to the end and we're looking at the community services chapter 2 maybe this doesn't even belong here anymore because it's really addressed somewhere else or land use or we're just pointing out where we want these things yeah yeah absolutely if we find there's just a better place in the same way that we talked about arts and culture we kind of decided it's better somewhere else we may just decide this is great but there isn't anything in aspiration B that the housing committee has to do so maybe we can just pluck that right out drop that right into the land use plan and say our goal in the land use plan is to have housing and parks and we're going to address that in our plan here and take it out of here good with however this that's actually a good segue to just to ask about about when you think we'll start on the land use plan it's one of the ones that would be in of the five that would be starting in February obviously I can't start all five of them at the same time but just five days in a work they're five days it'll depend a little bit on how much time we end up having to spend on the public hearing in the next meeting okay you know it says something that we move on relatively quickly to the city council or says something that we have to work and puts more time into we'll probably lose a meeting in February talking about our responses to what we hear in the next meeting but we will be working on these other chapters I'll be shooting for governance governance may wait a little bit longer on that one just because we're gonna be switching councils as of the town meeting day so of these five I'll probably work on arts and culture and community services trying to think about the timing with a couple of retirements showing up for public safety and CJC and maybe arts and culture and public safety that would be the first two that I would prioritize then community services okay then and there are going to be plenty of opportunities like we said every time we've worked on these there's nothing that says these are done at any point until they're in the city council's hands so anyone who comes up with new things that legislative changes that makes another program viable or a good opportunity for us we can always add it in after our public hearings or even before a public hearing so as I said I hope hopefully we you know as we said we've got housing done historic should be done you should be getting energy and transportation in in February I think that gets us a good okay good process moving forward economic development utilities and facilities shortly thereafter well do we have any changes I mean I have one that I would suggest which is just as we were talking about before in the benchmark on the aspiration a goal a in the first page to add the word minimum before net increase or something like a minimum net increase of 150 permanent housing units and I haven't really come this if there are any other similar places I think that could be important if we have a lot of success but of course we as we discussed we wouldn't want to stop a good thing just because we're we've had some success what do you guys think about that like the minimum I don't know if we want to replace the vacancies with like something around a target for like a mix of rent a little part ownership or part movie unit and single family or having I know that I get your point about it's a weird thing to like want to increase and maybe it's not the perfect measure but I yeah I guess I'm just struggling with thinking of something else that would be cumbersome to measure that's yeah has some has some relevance to what the you know the tight to having a tight housing market I don't know so I guess I would favor leaving vacancy in there but if someone can come up with something I mean because yeah the mix of rental and ownership might be helpful but it's necessarily that it's affordable rental either so I don't know well the more housing we get any kind should assuming it's not replacing another housing right right it should yeah I mean probably will but yeah and it's something that we as a city you know have some impact on whereas they can see ready aside from increasing the housing supply there's not not much we can do about making right unless we make we keep increasing the costs then yeah then it'll become so unaffordable that one of a 5% vacancies we will be we could do we have a target to increase some of the housing units to be permanently affordable I'm thinking under goal C I know adding adding one maintain a mix of housing types I saw disease levels of affordability and having at least one strategy there a benchmark or something that's specific to affordable housing and that's like me Jen might be able to be that this is what we can this is a reasonable goal for affordable housing we think we've talked about before I mean what problem up here has is that we do have some affordable housing that's subsidized and we have a lot of housing that's if you can afford it that's great but the middle income lower middle income housing where maybe you have an income you don't qualify for help that seems like a void they're not a lot of starter homes yeah we just don't have a lot of home development oh yeah we yeah the certainly not in the single-family homes most of what we get built our apartments units here units there but not a lot of single-family homes a lot of it goes back to and we don't have a lot of land when we look at a lot of the the the books on you know kind of getting a good pipeline for housing development usually goes back to having 24 to 36 months of available building lots ready to go and we pretty much had none I mean we don't have these subdivisions that are platted and you know when the market's ready we'll start building on that subdivision because already owned by the developer it's all ready to go we just have to we don't have any of that there was a little bit of that up in Stonewall meadows when Fecto hadn't approved subdivision up there but most of that is kind of fallen away now and we don't have any land area few if we were talking major metropolitan areas that's what they're looking at is the number of building building lots that are available for construction because then the construction of homes kind of when the market demands it they run in they build a bunch of houses but when we need housing we've got to run out and buy land subdivide the land and we just don't have once you've had it all those costs in what's coming out the other end is really expensive so do we have an idea for let's figure that out so yeah so that was one of the reasons we've looked at if the city were able to help the developer acquire savings pasture then we could help plant savings pasture and then we could sit back and say all right now we've got an opportunity to have that 24 to 36 months available building lots and and help to make that happen but that's kind of a one one-shot deal if we can make something like that happen so we can come up with them the next eight years do you think it would I mean like I said so by bringing that up how do you think we could incorporate that if we wanted to like could we do we make a goal of the city doing that there is Crestview but Crestview has always been an area which has been to talk to out for more higher-end homes it's it's less likely to support the the affordable housing not saying it couldn't incorporate some but it's an area that would be a lot more expensive to build and would be because of the views and because of the location would be more likely to have larger homes but it's also we've said we want all price price ranges so we would support that but something like a goal of the city taking an active role in subdividing land or a public-private partnership to subdivide available parcels we have like elements of that in here yeah it was gonna say I was reading through to see if there were some elements in there because it's been our goal our goal has been to partner with somebody we we really don't want to get ourselves involved as developers you know governments make terrible developers so we really be better off to try to find somebody who wants to do it and then support their their efforts that's why we have tiff that's why we have tax stabilization and other efforts because we could go through and say we can we can provide assistance on our end to reduce your costs is there anything more from like a form-based code or other regulatory issues that we could tackle to help things from your perspective I haven't heard that the regulations have been a significant certainly now with the new regulations that the regulations are significant barrier you know certainly the fact that we've got you know we're matching for densities at 90% when we've looked at projects and the potential of projects it's usually not the zoning you know the folks that purchased the VCFA parcel and are looking at the numbers there you know they're looking at putting 30 to 40 units on a parcel that has a density that has available 100 so you know the zoning really isn't going to be a barrier to fitting what they want it's really the fact that it's a topography that makes it impossible to develop that much more well I mean I'm in support of your idea to suggest that they add some third just add something about the city assisting with I don't know if that's already been yeah and I think that might actually take away from some of the other ones because there's just a ton of stuff here like if we're continuing programs how about we say we're gonna continue these 12 programs yeah and I think that'll come in with the reorganization I think that the thought process which for us to be able to think about all the things that we would do to achieve goal day but what are all the things we would do to increase the rental housing development and then we'll probably reorganize them once we get to the presentation part to go through and say you're down here in the bottom are all the things we're going to continue to do up here at the top these are our highest priority new things there are medium priority new things here are low priority new things and by combining all the strategies into one a bunch of them are going to go away because it's probably a high priority here and I prior to here and I prior to here it's going to still come out as a high priority for this new idea I was looking at the sprinkler ones too because it's the exact same strategy and more than one place in the sprinkler more sparkly barb yeah barb was very it was very adamant about amending the sprinkler ordinance in the past so right and there's so it's just sprinkler ordinance and there's just sprinkler incentive program which are kind of two separate but related items they all show up multiple times or more than twice yeah so I think that having a reorganized like that before we start figuring out where there's overlap between the chapters and making sure that they make sense together is going to be really helpful because it'll narrow the list down a little bit and make it a lot easier to look at yes and yeah and once we've got it we can high priorities are overall match and how they are how they don't match or where there's conflict because this is a really long list yes and we yes and we spent a lot of time with each group when we worked with them to kind of go through and try to get them to think outside the box because so many discussions are always like well we want to support this we want to encourage this we're like well you can't just encourage something we really have to start thinking about what specifically you know think outside the box think about tax stabilization think about other ways we can incentivize things and these were some of these were these were all the lists of things some of the things we already do and a number of things that like neighborhood development areas that would be something new for this policy around committed to affirmatively furthering fair housing and implementation of all of its programs project so Goldie yeah aspiration aspiration to start wondering like is there something there's something like more we can do to make more failure just more welcoming to diverse populations as opposed to like a policy that like yeah that's great that we should have that but do we want something more than that for like do we really expect adopting is this gonna how far is it's gonna get us towards like this aspiration or an aspiration of really welcoming more people and more than diverse populations I'm worried that we're not so it's like we should be doing more I don't know what it is it's just so there will be and maybe there needs to be more here but there is in the governance chapter is when we're gonna have the the city has a equity and justice committee I believe that's the name of it and that'll be discussed a lot in the governance chapter I think with how the entire government are we being equitable but certainly the affirmatively furthering fair housing is something a specific to housing and it was a little bit of a surprise to me that there isn't a formal policy on that it's it's really kind of it's an item that you get evaluated on based on your actions so it's more than just having a policy but it would be helpful to have a policy that says this is what it is so people can call you out on it if you don't do it if you don't say our policy is we're going to do this and we aren't doing it in this case but affirmatively furthering fair housing is requirement for community development and HUD grants so in the very least we should have a policy and and Kevin the who's to community development specialist has been working with somebody I think over at CBOEO and trying to come up with an actual policy that could be adopted by the council that would really lay out what it means to be furthering fair housing so that with one step that we felt we would at least be able to do is formal formally adopt the policy on that but then it's really is such an ambiguous aspiration you kind of know it when you see it do you want like a goal around housing for refugees and that's I think that would be a question of I think the one question I'll come up with that that probably would probably come up is we're having problems housing for the residents we have not that my or I think anyone in town as opposed to settling refugees but I think the one question would be is it appropriate when we have zero percent vacancy to try to encourage people more people to move to a town with zero percent vacancies I think we'll have more housing so they can yeah building the housing for the housing to make it happen yeah I would love to have the vacancy that we could fill it but are we are we interested in kicking back some of these things to the housing committee again or what will be like this that much you know back some of this I was just filled into other sections yeah we may see the stultage everything I think if we can we can note that for land use even and look explore that when we do the land use chapter because I had mentioned before treatment housing recovery housing rather in town and we haven't put it in the housing chapter yet I'm keeping it in mind at least for the land use chapter I think it's a good idea to incorporate or to ask the question anyways of how you can incorporate diversity and equity efforts into any because it wasn't in the it wasn't a mention of it in the one we did before the historic and cultural and art and culture wasn't a mention of a diverse art so like keeping that in mind and asking the question for each chapter I think is a good idea whether or not like an actual aspiration comes out of it I'm not sure but I think that's a good idea so we should continue to ask that question and where appropriate we should put in something she gets that mic yeah I was just yeah I'm thinking I was thinking a little bit of both both the comments we have in the aspiration I think we capture capture it better in the aspiration we do in our goals about we want to have housing for all and I think that we just need to do a better job of explaining what's captured in housing for all including treatment the Community Justice Center CJC they work a lot with people in re reintegration and so you know we need to have you know we we have an aspiration to have housing for all we aren't just coming up with a housing for some for a subset of the County or the community which would obviously start to impact and reflect on refugees what our policies are towards these other groups that are maybe disproportionately affected by other policies that we have so it's in our aspiration but I think it doesn't flow through to our goals and maybe that's the small failure that's in there right now situation in Rutland I think where the mayor sort of went out on his own and caused this whole thing I feel like we should just be very clear as a community that's working to like help house asylum seekers while they near their asylum cases I don't know if that would be helpful something so I don't know if they would happen I mean I'm happy to reach out to them if you think that would be helpful if they have any ideas on what could be put into the city plan okay yeah yeah yeah there's things we can put in the land use plan so yeah we'll be doing that ourselves so yeah but I do think it I think that comes in here in that housing for all we would and I'll put down some notes see if there's something we can massage to get in this case of identifying and identifying barriers there's being welcoming strategy the first strategy under that one is sponsor support at least one housing planning effort to identify community housing needs or to study impediments to fair housing say specifically with the marginalized hopefully that's implied by fair housing the housing planning effort usually these usually these get sponsored through down street and so they're the ones who kind of asked to have that inserted because it helps them to be able to get grant funding if they can show that it's in their plan so this should be basically laying the groundwork for there you know once every 10 years they'll do another assessment okay so I've only heard one definite change that's the inclusion of the word minimum and then we have some things to look into so one more time does anyone have any definite changes they want to make and I'll look into John had made a recommendation about the the recommended training opportunities from like incremental development alliance so I'll take a look see what I can come up with a strategy okay kind of insert that okay that'd be great anymore we need to approve the chapter at this point or it gets you guys can approve it I mean I've got column here for PC approved just knowing that it's this is just basically getting it to a point where this is one that we can consider it's done until we start getting into the public hearing process okay we're talking about reorganizing it later to move things around right so that would be and then once we have all different okay it's going to take that make a motion if you're comfortable yeah you wish to stop talking but yeah so I just want to do a clean transition to something else okay well we'll say done for now with those items we've discussed tonight that's good I have an item that someone to move on but before we get to discussion the public hearing this is kind of related to that actually and but also something I probably should have mentioned earlier from the chair I will not be able to be here on February 24th which is the second Monday of February we tend to do vacation on town hall meeting week so with that said we'll have the hearing next time and then then we'll have a meeting right yeah well the hearing on the 27th and we have a meeting on the 10th we yeah February 10th so for the February 10th meeting I'll be here and we'll get back into some of this and then I'll coordinate with Aaron for February 24th around that meeting so just to get the heads up well in advance just so everyone knows and it looks like around that time we'll be looking at what energy or economic transportation so we looking at one of those yes or yeah historic resources back yeah but I'm thinking based on our discussion tonight and this is something maybe I'll send out a refresher email after this room just a sort of follow-up email after tonight but it's looking like yeah well probably let's not plan to get into the land use plan until basically March and because of things that lets a lot of things fall into place maybe even late March but we can we'll have these other chapters to look at in the meantime so so with that in mind let's talk about next meeting which is the public hearing on design review which we've gone over quite a lot in addition to sort of a heads up for the next few meetings I'll also try to get out a refresher about where we are in design review but we can also talk about talk about that like what do you think and Mike what to expect next time so we have prepared a couple hundred letters you'll get one you're in the design review district or proposed either the existing or the proposed so we will be sending out letters to everybody in the district they're all sitting down in the desk they'll be mailed out tomorrow so knowing that it'll probably get some some amount of interest so I think it's just really kind of a wait-and-see I know historic preservation and Meredith will be here for the meeting we'll go through the presentation that they did before just to get everybody up to speed on what's being proposed and then really I think these are always I mean a couple of you have been through this before with the zoning update you just never know where this is going to go and what people are going to latch on to and what's going to be the issues and in some cases it's something fairly easy to go through and say okay you know we made these three proposals and people really don't like this piece so we can take that piece out sometimes it's easy sometimes it's complicated to discuss both yeah the boundary change and the new the new regulations and maybe people focus on one maybe we hear about both so is Meredith planning to do most of the presenting or should we prepare the boundary yeah we would probably I would probably have to be prepared to talk about the boundary I'll probably work with her on looking at the PowerPoint and see if we could add in that discussion and we'll see we as I said we sent out letters to everybody who is either in or is going to be added in just so everybody has you know our jobs mostly or to listen and take notes yep take take the input and see what people you know and if we start to hear a lot about one thing you know see if people have comments you know make sure people are aware of the other thing to go and think you know all we've heard about is the map does anyone have any thoughts on what that actual new regulations say or vice versa but I think probably I would imagine most of the conversation it certainly the last time we did this most of the conversation was based on who is new to the district and people who are new to the district weren't happy with it and cliff street was not happy with it the cliff street didn't want to remain in the new areas didn't want to get added in so we've left them out and we've left them out so they're gonna come and thank us right they may do we have a good new map with the final boundary and we do yep yep and it's online so if there's anyone listening or anyone here wants to go and take a look if you go onto the front web page city web page on the left you scroll down a little bit there's a list of probably eight or nine different things one of which says design review proposal if you click on that they'll have the map and the rules sounds great so with that maybe we can turn early and everyone can go and study hearing so do we have a much new turn okay and okay for a move by John seconded by Stephanie and what that looks to saying let's go home